Author Description

Alpha Novak is a doctor of invasive cybernetics in the near future. She was just about to begin a fellowship at one of Europe’s most prestigious hospitals, when a series of events left her with no medical license, a pile of debts, and in desperate need of a job. She soon finds herself in a far-flung tin sarcophagus -- the space station Eris TKS, in orbit around Mars, and waystation for the mining ships harvesting the solar system’s asteroid belt. Fighting boredom, corporate bureaucracy, and terrible space station cuisine, she eases in to her new daily grind, treating injuries and repairing prosthetics and implants for the miners passing through the station. At her side is her trusty assistant, the bonobo Kit, who owes his near-human intelligence the brain implant Alpha installed in him years ago on Earth. Despite his penchant for mischief and insatiable appetite for sweets, the two share a bond rooted in their intertwined histories back on Earth. Everything changes one day when a miner shows up in Alpha’s clinic complaining about his pacemaker. Alpha soon tracks his symptoms to a severe malfunction in the miner’s brain implant, provided by his employer to reduce the need for sleep and to increase productivity. At first unable to use her normal tricks to troubleshoot the issue, Alpha digs deeper into the implant’s firmware. What she finds is unprecedented, and terrifying: a computer virus has evolved the ability to spread to human brain implants. To make matters worse, it can spread through the ubiquitous computer systems aboard the space station. Alpha tries in vain to warn the station authorities, who deny the possibility of a computer virus able to infect human implants. Even as implant-wearers start exhibiting strange behavior all over the space station, Alpha’s warnings fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile, the space station systems start malfunctioning as well, the chief engineer is nowhere to be found, and no one seems willing or able to help her investigate. As Alpha